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Greetings from San Diego. You Thought Bernie Madoff Was Audacious When Bernie Madoff was arrested, most thought he was the most audacious Ponzi-scheme fraudster in U.S. history. But just nine days earlier another Ponzi fraudster was arrested. I thought this man was even more brazen. I first learned about him in a Vanity Fair article […]
Eight months ago I wrote about bankers working such long hours that they collapsed at their desks. In 2024 a 35-year-old former special forces intern at Bank of America was working more than 100 hours a week. Think about this. That’s 14 hours a day and 7 days a week. He collapsed and died. The […]
Greetings from San Diego Suppose Your Great Uncle Was a Hitman Imagine that your whole family knew that your great uncle, Heshy, was a hitman who’d killed 20 people. Now that is a family secret. Then one day your great uncle calls you. From prison. He knows you’re a journalist and wants you to write […]
The U.S. Treasury has sanctioned a few people and some companies associated with laundering money for the Sinaloa cartel. They’ve used the authority provided by designating the cartel as a terrorist organization. Treasury indicates that the cartel has used currency exchanges and bulk cash pickups to launder the money. This has been going on for […]
Hello from San Diego. With so many scams going on, this feels appropriate. Speaking of scams, my friend, Kathleen Donnelly, wrote a special piece this issue on bags that fool narcotics-sniffing dogs. She is an expert on this because she used to have a drug-sniffing dog business. Here she is with four of her dogs. […]
One of the strangest trips I took was to Bogotá in 1994, shortly after Pablo Escobar was killed. I was trying to write my first book, a thriller that took place there. I knew people from when I had spent a summer working with the YMCA in Bogotá after graduating from high school. Chepe Laspina, […]
A free book and a friend who fell in love with a con artist Hello from San Diego. It is in the 40s at night here. Sorry to brag. Well, Valentine’s Day just happened on Friday so here’s something that most males say at one time or another. I’ve got a free book from […]
La Jolla, because of its wealth, has always attracted scammers. So I wasn’t surprised. that another one cropped up. The company is called Ethos Asset Management. I never heard of it, but back in 2023 the artificial intelligence company Beyond Limits accused the CEO, Carlos Santos, of fraud. But it took awhile to catch him. […]
I’ll leave you to speculate why I’m thinking about this now. It’s what I learned after watching Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. He, like a number of dictators, tried to seize power, failed, and succeeded the second time around. Hug Chavez attempted a coup in Venezuela in 1992 and was imprisoned. From inside his jail, he […]
What we were all afraid of is coming true. People are literally falling in love with ChatpGPT. They find the software more understanding and entertaining than their spouses and partners. After all, the program learns what you prefer and feeds it to back to you. If you want to read a creepy article about relationships […]